Root Rot

Well, the Jalapeno and Red bell have had root rot.  My Jalapeno died because I didn't know what was wrong with it until my Red bell started doing the same thing.  The leaves get super soft and droopy, and the roots are brown and soft.  I pulled all the brown roots off of  the Red bell hopefully that was what I was supposed to do.  There were only a few short white roots left, thicker than all the brown hair roots but still not enough to support itself at its current sized.  

When transferring plants from soil, CLEAN the roots completely, especially on the peppers.  Also, spread the roots apart don't just dig a hole in your grow medium and plop it in.  If there are chunks of soil and/or the roots are just in a ball, they will not dry enough between water cycles; the plant will drown.

Five Tilapia, Duckweed and String Algae

Today I was searching for aquaponic groups in Mesa and I found Garden Pool. They were featured on the news a while back because they turned an empty pool into a green house with a pond in the deep end.  I got to check it out today when I bought the Tilapia and plants from them.  I got them at 5:00 pm and have had them in a five gallon bucket this whole time letting the water temp slowly rise and periodically adding some of my aquaponic water to their water.  It's been 7 hours, the fish have been snacking on duckweed and having a bubble bath.  The 27 feeder fish that I was trying to put in my system all died in three days.  I put the bag of fish into my fish tank to let the water temp match up and it changed too quickly killing all of them rather quickly.  So hopefully these fish are as resilient to changes in temperature and water quality as they're supposed to be. 

My camera battery is died and I cannot find the charger... I really wanted to show you the changes I've made to grow the string algae and duckweed.  

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Welcome to My Aquaponics in the Phoenix Area

Let me introduce myself a bit.  My name is Ryan and I live in Mesa, Arizona.  I married my beautiful wife Caitlin about 9 months ago. We both go to work full-time, I work at a manufacturing company in Tempe and Caitlin just started working at an automotive care center, today was her first day.
 I planted an Oregano, Red Bell, Tomato, Green Onion and Greek Basil  about two weeks ago and yesterday I put twenty-seven feeder minnows in. I currently have five plants and two fish, yes two fish from the original twenty-seven. For those of you that do not live in a HOT climate, I envy you. I went to my local aquarium store today to test my water for the fish, for free btw, the test results showed that the water was perfectly fine.  I bought a floating thermometer and dropped it in the fish tank when i got home.  The water was at 98 degrees. Now, that is a little bit too much on the warm side for any fish. I spent this afternoon searching for ideas on how to cool the water down.  I could buy a water cooler for $300, ha, someone else suggested on yahoo answers to freeze water in bottles and float them in the water, I decided to give that a try.  The water melted pretty quickly and the water temp came down to about 96 degrees, yippie!  My observation is the temperature dropped because it was getting later in the day. Tomorrow I'll see if the little minnows are still swimming right side up.
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Red Bell (Was planted too deep and all the leafs popped off)

Tomato (Got a little crispy, now I think it just needs more nutrients)

Onion pulled from my in-laws dried up garden.

Oregano dried up (Tastes amazing though)